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Dell Boomi has put a new twist on master data management (MDM), by asking dev-starved organizations to keep their critical information in the cloud.

The Boomi MDM technology was launched by Dell on Monday and is meant for medium-sized businesses that dabble in cloud services along with on-premise software, but which lack the IT expertise to manage it all.

The subscription-based software gives organizations access to a cloudy, multi-tenant, MySQL-based database that stores a master copy of important data and replicates changes out to on-premise applications and cloud services alike.

The service is based out of a single US data center region for now, with plans to open up another facility in either Ireland or London in a year, Boomi product manager Chris McNabb told The Register.

If customers consume all three of these at once, then the MDM will become a hub database for important reference data, like customer records, and the other services will help replicate data out to other services while making sure everything stays in sync.

The service will go up against similar MDM services from Informatica, IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

Dell is betting that the relative simplicity of its Boomi product set will help it sell to small businesses that would be confused by more sophisticated rival offerings.

Pricing for the service is charged on a per-record (row) basis, starting at $6,000 per month for 250,000 records.

Customers can have an unlimited number of users and domains, so they can split their records across as many categories as they like, McNabb said.

Dell acquired Boomi in 2010 as the company went on a software-as-a-service M&A binge to help defend against the collapsing margins in its PC business. ®